Don’t Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America

"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.Your
gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness
against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped
treasure together for the last days.Behold,
the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of
you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped
are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.Be
patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the
husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long
patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh." -James 5:1-8

“The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American
president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian
classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth,
the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate
the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the
universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy
institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas.”—Journalist Lewis Lapham
-

Being a citizen in the American corporate state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose.

The game is rigged, and “we the people”
keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, most stay in the game,
against all odds, trusting that their luck will change.

The problem, of course, is that luck
will not save us. As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People,
the people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the
prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have
only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control
over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.

It really doesn’t matter what you
call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the
masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state,
the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are
dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.

Incredibly, no matter how many times
we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that
politics matter, as if there really were a difference between the Republicans
and Democrats (there’s not).

Politics is a game, a joke, a
hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout
Americans, a religion.

In other words, it’s a sophisticated
ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities are exactly the same.
It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in
out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect
for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about
their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking
liberty.

Most of all, both parties enjoy an
intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that
rule this country. Don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling.
They’re just useful tactics of the psychology of hate that has been proven to engage voters
and increase voter turnout while keeping us at each other’s throats.

We are living in a fantasy world
carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy. It used to be that
the cogs, wheels and gear shifts in our government machinery worked to keep our
republic running smoothly. However, without our fully realizing it, the
mechanism has changed. Its purpose is no longer to keep our republic running
smoothly. To the contrary, this particular contraption’s purpose is to keep the
corporate police state in power. Its various parts are already a corrupt part
of the whole.

Just consider how insidious,
incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the
mechanism have become.

Congress.Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious
culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to
be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system
that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long
before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their
wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money.
As Reuters reports, “For many lawmakers, the daily routine in Washington
involves fundraising as much as legislating. The culture of nonstop political
campaigning shapes the rhythms of daily life in Congress, as well as the
landscape around the Capitol. It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of
the wealthy than anyone else.”

The President. With the 2016 presidential election shaping up to be
the most expensive one in our nation’s history, with estimates as high as $10
billion, “the way is open for an orgy of spending by well-heeled interest
groups and super rich individuals on both political sides.” Yet even after the
votes have been counted and favors tallied, the work of buying and selling
access to the White House is far from over. President Obama spends significant
amounts of time hosting and attending fundraisers, having held more than 400 fundraising events over the
course of his two terms in office. Such access comes with a steep price tag. It
used to be that $100,000 got you an overnight stay at the White
House. Now it will cost you $500,000 for four meetings a year with President
Obama. Yet as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig asks, “[H]ow does a man, as a
person, run the nation when he’s attending 228 fundraisers? And the answer is
not very well. It's pretty terrible for your ability to do your job.
It's pretty terrible for your ability to be responsive to the American people,
because—let me tell you—the American people are not attending 228 fundraisers.
Those people are different.”

The Supreme Court.The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the
one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging
tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American
police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes
while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her
rights. Like the rest of the government, the Court has routinely prioritized
profit, security, and convenience over the basic rights of the citizenry.
Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the
Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of
privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history, sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful.
For example, contrast the Court’s affirmation of the “free speech” rights of
corporations and wealthy donors in McCutcheon v. FEC, which does away
with established limits on the number of candidates an entity can support with
campaign contributions, and Citizens United v. FEC with its tendency to
deny those same rights to average Americans when government interests abound,
and you’ll find a noticeable disparity.

The Media.Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be
completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s
largest corporations. Besides shoving drivel down our throats at every possible
moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks
against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state.
The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst
propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.

The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in
America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees,
drones, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in
lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and
private. Through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an
out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American
society.

Our failure to remain informed about
what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to
vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government
representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of
our fellow Americans has been our downfall.

Now we find ourselves once again
caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the
majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and
bring about change—as if the new boss will be different from the old boss.

The politicians are put there to
give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no
choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the
important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought
and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They
got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies,
so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying.
Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more
for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t
want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical
thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s
against their interests.

They want obedient workers. Obedient
workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the
paperwork…. It’s a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big
club. ...The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to
notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called
the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.